apeljohn
Non-Player Character
- Location
- Earth Aleph
Garotte? Is that you?
"No, I said the objective was survival. Not freaking your creator the hell out."
H+ Mayhem (Worm)
- Thread starter Jurric
- Start date
-
- Tags
- worm tinker transhumanism mayhem
Garotte? Is that you?
"No, I said the objective was survival. Not freaking your creator the hell out."
Legion1771
The God
Breathing in the catacombs?
Umm, what?
I'm not that surprised. Mayhem does run on the same brainmeats as our tinker protag, and thus should have access to all his memories. From another point of view, Mayhem is the protag, but unburdened by slow, unwieldy self-awareness. That's what I think anyway.
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hmmm...."fight the prince" has no "and defeat him" attached...
and given that the question asked was "Objectives, Survival, Tell me what you think I should do",
Mayhem looks more likely to want to join the nine than fight against them...
Legion1771
The God
I'm sorry. I can't think of *sharp inhale* without thinking of Radioactive and my friend's butchered interpretation of it.
Uh, you just lost me. Is 'Radioactive' a game or a novel or something?
Legion1771
The God
It's a song by Imagine Dragons. There's a very sharp inhale at some point. It amuses me.
Ah, I see. New song to check out then.
RazorSmile
ROB Used To Be A Knife Missile
Mayhem Protocol talking makes me think of an inverse Glastig Uiaine. No, an inverse Ciara. He's a DID-filtered interpretation of our protagonist's shard. Like if GU's 'shades' had personalities and could speak.
I think Kaiser needs line of sight, actually. So unless Mayhem has a visible metal extension of metal sticking out of his head, he isn't risking a spontaneous head stabbing.
- Pronouns
- she/her
Oh. Hello there, Peter Watts, I didn't see you and your vampires (and Portia?) come in.
Please don't kill me.
theflyingbiscuit
"Titanic neechan"
... You have very strange whims.
- Location
- italy
Man, with the advent of parahumans, the IRS REALLY stepped up its game.
Zephyrus
You may fire when ready.
- Location
- Kentucky
Interesting. I wonder precisely how the Mayhem Protocol works. I get the feeling that it taps into that primordial hind brain, the leftover bits of evolution that still influence us to this day; the fight or flight response, the herd mentality of safety in numbers, etc., etc.
The hind brain governs survival. It does not, however, govern homicidal tendencies. Only a very convoluted interpretation of our hero's command would cause Mayhem to believe that survival warrants killing absolutely everyone.
Tinkering (no pun intended, I assure you) with the brain's chemistry is dangerous, dangerous stuff. Why do you think even Panacea wouldn't do it, aside from her personal hangups? There's no telling what our hero's manipulation of his emotions and self has done to his pysche.
The hind brain governs survival. It does not, however, govern homicidal tendencies. Only a very convoluted interpretation of our hero's command would cause Mayhem to believe that survival warrants killing absolutely everyone.
Tinkering (no pun intended, I assure you) with the brain's chemistry is dangerous, dangerous stuff. Why do you think even Panacea wouldn't do it, aside from her personal hangups? There's no telling what our hero's manipulation of his emotions and self has done to his pysche.
Malbutorius
C'est le bien qui fait mal
I would think that Mayhem would be a total sociopath rather than a gleeful psychopath. He only does what's absolutely necessary in a fight after all.
Tisaku
Head Chief Thinkomancer
Alternatively: The Mayhem Protocols aren't actually self-aware and can't acutally parse questions directed at it.
Instead the prediction wetware is just attempting to solve the task of Survival of a protag who just so happens to have a deathwish of going up against the S9 in his teens. On top of that, this long-term and open-ended task must be solved in the 30 seconds allotted to it. The predicition wetware pieces together a speech simulation aiming for maximum impact on the protag's psyche to instigate action.
The simulation of a personality is crafted towards maximum existential horror, aiming to instil both an obsession with the protocols themselves and thus towards 'fixing' it (read, improving it) as the Mayhem Protocol is hands down his most powerful force-multiplier, while at the same time it is trying to push his choices towards all-out war against E88 and anyone/everyone it can to feed the other force-multiplier which is his Tinker tech trees and hopefuly snowball fast enough that by the time Jack comes calling he can actually have a chance and fulfill that difficult 'Survival' qualifier.
When Humanity goes extinct, its not going to be due to evil AI overlords ala Skynet, its going to be from poorly worded parameters with not enough qualifiers and a dumb machine just carrying it out to the best of its (insanely powerful) means.
Instead the prediction wetware is just attempting to solve the task of Survival of a protag who just so happens to have a deathwish of going up against the S9 in his teens. On top of that, this long-term and open-ended task must be solved in the 30 seconds allotted to it. The predicition wetware pieces together a speech simulation aiming for maximum impact on the protag's psyche to instigate action.
The simulation of a personality is crafted towards maximum existential horror, aiming to instil both an obsession with the protocols themselves and thus towards 'fixing' it (read, improving it) as the Mayhem Protocol is hands down his most powerful force-multiplier, while at the same time it is trying to push his choices towards all-out war against E88 and anyone/everyone it can to feed the other force-multiplier which is his Tinker tech trees and hopefuly snowball fast enough that by the time Jack comes calling he can actually have a chance and fulfill that difficult 'Survival' qualifier.
When Humanity goes extinct, its not going to be due to evil AI overlords ala Skynet, its going to be from poorly worded parameters with not enough qualifiers and a dumb machine just carrying it out to the best of its (insanely powerful) means.
Malbutorius
C'est le bien qui fait mal
I like this alternative. It sounds realistic!
FarmerKyle
Reaping what I Sow
- Location
- Out in the Fields
Have to say, I like that alternative.
The Stormbringer
Worm Fanfic & Crack Connoisseur
- Location
- Spaaaaace~!
At least he's acknowledging that he's letting them get to him. Now he just needs to do something about it. Mayhem has the right idea, but he'd need to tinker up some more self-improvements and likely some good armor before attempting it. Perhaps a way to extend Mayhem's duration a bit more?
2.3
- Location
- Australia
Two hours later I was pouring over the code for the Mayhem Protocol, trying to figure out where I had gone wrong.
My best idea right now was to ask Mayhem itself, but I was reluctant to do that. For obvious reasons.
It took me nearly an hour to figure out that Mayhem had adjusted my fear levels. Subtly, and fear felt natural after watching yourself talk like that, so I nearly hadn't noticed it.
Mayhem had done, in my estimation, three 'impossible things' in one brief remonstration.
Mayhem, the actual thing itself, was actually a fairly small program stored in my neural implant. Small is relative, a couple of gigabytes of code is quite significant, but not nearly complex enough to hold an actual mind…
Or was it? I wasn't an AI tinker, I had very few AI blueprints, and all of them were near the tops of their respective trees.
I opened up the block of code that made up Mayhem, and started trying to make sense of it. Of course it was vastly different from what I originally wrote. Mayhem was self improving. If it accomplished an objective it used my brain and power to improve itself, if it was struggling, or failed, it would re-write itself to solve the problem.
The Mayhem Protocol had been one of the first things available when I opened up the Neural Enhancement branch of the Human Augmentation tree, but even now, with all the extra energy invested into that tree, I hadn't been able to fully understand it.
Mayhem wasn't an AI, at least not in any traditional sense. It should just be me, but with everything non-essential to objectives that I set stripped away, and re-purposed into processing power for that objective. The human brain was both a powerful number cruncher, and flexible in a way that almost boggles the imagination. It's also really good at running incredibly fast simulations.
Say you take someone's sandwich, and they confront you about it. Your mind can take all the information you have on your victim, process it, determine how they will respond, and then tell you what to do in that brief second before your silence becomes damning. Mayhem was supposed to be like that, but optimized for combat. It wasn't supposed to be this… creepy… thing.
OK, let's break it down. What did Mayhem do first?
He called me 'Pathetic Creator?' No, even before that, he smiled.
Mayhem shouldn't smile. I'd only just taught the program to feint, Mayhem had no use for anything that didn't fulfill it's objectives. Could it perform social engineering? Possibly. It was built on my brain, it had access to the Espionage tree, just like I did, it could access my memories for solutions to problems. I had taught it to feint, it only needed one example of how that could fool an opponent.
So when it insulted me, it thought that would help it achieve it's objectives… which was to answer my question? What had that question been exactly? I re-wound my mask. 'Tell me what you think I should do?'
It should have been too open ended for a direct answer. No, wait, there had been another objective. Survival. I included that as a standard precaution, because the Mayhem Protocol was designed to only perform objectives. If someone started shooting at me while the Protocol was active, it would only dodge or seek cover if it would otherwise be unable to complete it's other objectives.
Then there was the reason I named it Mayhem in the first place. The very first time I activated it, with absolutely no orders, it had trashed my room. Just thrown things around, punched walls, broke a bit of my old equipment. I assumed it was running the learning algorithms physically, learning to move and attack in a three dimensional environment, but I hadn't been sure.
And looking at the code was getting me nowhere. I'd need to run it, unpack it, watch it in motion to fully understand it, and it was designed to run on a fully sapient brain. I could grow one, but that posed interesting moral quandaries that I really didn't want to go into. I could record my own brain, but that was going to be awkward, because I couldn't really direct the code, fiddle with it or otherwise poke it while it was active.
I took a deep breath, and started setting up a program on the spinal chip that would inhibit my movement again. Then I programmed a few safeties into the neural chip, making it reset my emotional state to what I would describe as my pre-Tinker baseline when the spinal chip let me move again. Then locking the program so it would take more than thirty seconds to remove.
Finally, I was back where I started. Time to test a theory.
"Mayhem. Objectives: Tell me what I should do? Time, thirty seconds. Activate."
I woke back up, waited for my blocks to wear off, and then checked the mask.
This time there had been less of a response. I'd simply sat in the chair, stared at my computer monitor. Eventually my mouth moved. One word.
"Fight."
My face had been blank the whole time.
So… why had removing survival from the command made such a huge difference? The first time, Mayhem had been complex. There was extensive use of metaphor. I'd have bet money he could pass the Turing test. He'd been deliberately terrifying. So why was that important to my survival?
I could understand it perhaps, if there had been no response this time. The survival command was received and interpreted, and for some reason the program thought that it's little melodrama would help me survive. The question was simply ignored because it wasn't an objective, the Mayhem Protocol hadn't been designed to answer questions, and my tech was still tech. If it wasn't designed to do something it didn't do it. That was how technology worked. No 'robots turning on humanity,' just robots that did what they were told to do, or did nothing, because that's what happens when the wrong orders are given.
That still raised the question of why Mayhem thought I needed to hear that to survive, but I could maybe see that happening. It was an organic system, the robot analogy wasn't perfect.
But the second time I asked, without the survival clause, it had still given me an answer. In a way, it could even be called the same answer, in a slightly different form. If I was correct in my interpretation Mayhem wanted me to fight the Empire, use the conflict to upgrade myself, and him. He thought that was how to 'Survive.' He'd been able to put a fair amount of emotion and abstract thought into his urging, although I wouldn't say that it actually made me want to fight the Empire. So points for creativity, but none for social manipulation.
Unless he was saying that I was being corrupted by the Empire. I had tried to give Mayhem my morals. A sort of sub-set of very objectives, always present, even when they weren't mentioned, that could be overwritten by actual orders…
If it had just listed off my morals as 'what I should do' that might have made a bit of sense, they were in there, although I wasn't sure just how much of an effect they had. But instead it said 'fight.'
Had that come from me? From some sort of primitive instinct that the Protocol didn't fully suppress? Was that what my moral code was? I doubt it.
No there was something else, something influencing my brain, and when the Protocol didn't have much else running, that effect was more plain, it was able to give the Protocol priorities that I hadn't specifically assigned. In this case, the priority to 'fight.'
I looked at the images of my brain on the computer monitor, and tried to remember why I brought them up. Ah, that was right, the Mayhem Protocol had been acting up, and I needed to figure out why.
I dismissed the brain scans, looked at my empty cup of coffee, and texted Stacy to make me a new one. Looked like I'd have to go through the code line by line, even if I didn't understand some of it.
Stacy came in, smiling that persistent Cheshire grin, and put a cup down on the table for me.
"Mayhem, you do know that it's six AM?" She said.
"It can't be. I only just came back from meeting Kaiser a few hours ago." I said. "Besides, if it was that late, you'd have gone home."
"I did. Mom looked after you till five AM, and called me back for the early shift."
I checked my computer. I'd been a little bit lost in the code, but it hadn't been that long.
"Guess I won't get much sleep tonight then. I need to solve this." I told her, taking a deep sip of the coffee.
Well blast. She'd slipped one of my sedatives into it.
***
I woke up in bed, which was at least better than pulling my face off a keyboard.
I lay there, looking at the ceiling for a long time, my mind chasing loops of thought. Eventually I decided I'd wasted enough time.
"Stacy, you have until I am capable of moving to get me a real cup of coffee, or you do not want to know what I will do your brain."
I rolled out of bed. Fought with myself internally for a few minutes, and then started my exercise routine. Over three weeks of a Tinkertech diet and exercise regime had helped me immensely, even if I wasn't following my powers advice on sleep patterns. I was now at the point where, even without my technology. I was almost a match for one unpowered, unarmed gang member.
Not actually impressive, but not too bad considering where I started.
From there, it was time for more study.
I was in my lab, replaying two files on my mask, trying to make sense of them when Victor came to visit me.
The first was the Mayhem Protocol, trapped in a chair and given ten seconds to fulfill the objective, 'tell me what you are.'
It had responded. 'The Mayhem Protocol.'
The next was the same protocol, still trapped in a chair, and given ten seconds to fulfill two objectives. 'Tell me what you are' and 'survive.'
It had responded. 'I am what will rise from your ashes.'
Apparently my survival depended on melodrama. I made a mental note to come back to the Mayhem issue before I tried to use it again as Victor entered the lab, and another mental note to find Stacy and teach her how to brew a proper cup of coffee. Then rose.
I had a breakout to plan.
My best idea right now was to ask Mayhem itself, but I was reluctant to do that. For obvious reasons.
It took me nearly an hour to figure out that Mayhem had adjusted my fear levels. Subtly, and fear felt natural after watching yourself talk like that, so I nearly hadn't noticed it.
Mayhem had done, in my estimation, three 'impossible things' in one brief remonstration.
- He had somehow managed to learn how to talk.
- He had demonstrated sapience, or at least higher reasoning.
- He had demonstrated a vastly different personality.
Mayhem, the actual thing itself, was actually a fairly small program stored in my neural implant. Small is relative, a couple of gigabytes of code is quite significant, but not nearly complex enough to hold an actual mind…
Or was it? I wasn't an AI tinker, I had very few AI blueprints, and all of them were near the tops of their respective trees.
I opened up the block of code that made up Mayhem, and started trying to make sense of it. Of course it was vastly different from what I originally wrote. Mayhem was self improving. If it accomplished an objective it used my brain and power to improve itself, if it was struggling, or failed, it would re-write itself to solve the problem.
The Mayhem Protocol had been one of the first things available when I opened up the Neural Enhancement branch of the Human Augmentation tree, but even now, with all the extra energy invested into that tree, I hadn't been able to fully understand it.
Mayhem wasn't an AI, at least not in any traditional sense. It should just be me, but with everything non-essential to objectives that I set stripped away, and re-purposed into processing power for that objective. The human brain was both a powerful number cruncher, and flexible in a way that almost boggles the imagination. It's also really good at running incredibly fast simulations.
Say you take someone's sandwich, and they confront you about it. Your mind can take all the information you have on your victim, process it, determine how they will respond, and then tell you what to do in that brief second before your silence becomes damning. Mayhem was supposed to be like that, but optimized for combat. It wasn't supposed to be this… creepy… thing.
OK, let's break it down. What did Mayhem do first?
He called me 'Pathetic Creator?' No, even before that, he smiled.
Mayhem shouldn't smile. I'd only just taught the program to feint, Mayhem had no use for anything that didn't fulfill it's objectives. Could it perform social engineering? Possibly. It was built on my brain, it had access to the Espionage tree, just like I did, it could access my memories for solutions to problems. I had taught it to feint, it only needed one example of how that could fool an opponent.
So when it insulted me, it thought that would help it achieve it's objectives… which was to answer my question? What had that question been exactly? I re-wound my mask. 'Tell me what you think I should do?'
It should have been too open ended for a direct answer. No, wait, there had been another objective. Survival. I included that as a standard precaution, because the Mayhem Protocol was designed to only perform objectives. If someone started shooting at me while the Protocol was active, it would only dodge or seek cover if it would otherwise be unable to complete it's other objectives.
Then there was the reason I named it Mayhem in the first place. The very first time I activated it, with absolutely no orders, it had trashed my room. Just thrown things around, punched walls, broke a bit of my old equipment. I assumed it was running the learning algorithms physically, learning to move and attack in a three dimensional environment, but I hadn't been sure.
And looking at the code was getting me nowhere. I'd need to run it, unpack it, watch it in motion to fully understand it, and it was designed to run on a fully sapient brain. I could grow one, but that posed interesting moral quandaries that I really didn't want to go into. I could record my own brain, but that was going to be awkward, because I couldn't really direct the code, fiddle with it or otherwise poke it while it was active.
I took a deep breath, and started setting up a program on the spinal chip that would inhibit my movement again. Then I programmed a few safeties into the neural chip, making it reset my emotional state to what I would describe as my pre-Tinker baseline when the spinal chip let me move again. Then locking the program so it would take more than thirty seconds to remove.
Finally, I was back where I started. Time to test a theory.
"Mayhem. Objectives: Tell me what I should do? Time, thirty seconds. Activate."
I woke back up, waited for my blocks to wear off, and then checked the mask.
This time there had been less of a response. I'd simply sat in the chair, stared at my computer monitor. Eventually my mouth moved. One word.
"Fight."
My face had been blank the whole time.
So… why had removing survival from the command made such a huge difference? The first time, Mayhem had been complex. There was extensive use of metaphor. I'd have bet money he could pass the Turing test. He'd been deliberately terrifying. So why was that important to my survival?
I could understand it perhaps, if there had been no response this time. The survival command was received and interpreted, and for some reason the program thought that it's little melodrama would help me survive. The question was simply ignored because it wasn't an objective, the Mayhem Protocol hadn't been designed to answer questions, and my tech was still tech. If it wasn't designed to do something it didn't do it. That was how technology worked. No 'robots turning on humanity,' just robots that did what they were told to do, or did nothing, because that's what happens when the wrong orders are given.
That still raised the question of why Mayhem thought I needed to hear that to survive, but I could maybe see that happening. It was an organic system, the robot analogy wasn't perfect.
But the second time I asked, without the survival clause, it had still given me an answer. In a way, it could even be called the same answer, in a slightly different form. If I was correct in my interpretation Mayhem wanted me to fight the Empire, use the conflict to upgrade myself, and him. He thought that was how to 'Survive.' He'd been able to put a fair amount of emotion and abstract thought into his urging, although I wouldn't say that it actually made me want to fight the Empire. So points for creativity, but none for social manipulation.
Unless he was saying that I was being corrupted by the Empire. I had tried to give Mayhem my morals. A sort of sub-set of very objectives, always present, even when they weren't mentioned, that could be overwritten by actual orders…
If it had just listed off my morals as 'what I should do' that might have made a bit of sense, they were in there, although I wasn't sure just how much of an effect they had. But instead it said 'fight.'
Had that come from me? From some sort of primitive instinct that the Protocol didn't fully suppress? Was that what my moral code was? I doubt it.
No there was something else, something influencing my brain, and when the Protocol didn't have much else running, that effect was more plain, it was able to give the Protocol priorities that I hadn't specifically assigned. In this case, the priority to 'fight.'
I looked at the images of my brain on the computer monitor, and tried to remember why I brought them up. Ah, that was right, the Mayhem Protocol had been acting up, and I needed to figure out why.
I dismissed the brain scans, looked at my empty cup of coffee, and texted Stacy to make me a new one. Looked like I'd have to go through the code line by line, even if I didn't understand some of it.
Stacy came in, smiling that persistent Cheshire grin, and put a cup down on the table for me.
"Mayhem, you do know that it's six AM?" She said.
"It can't be. I only just came back from meeting Kaiser a few hours ago." I said. "Besides, if it was that late, you'd have gone home."
"I did. Mom looked after you till five AM, and called me back for the early shift."
I checked my computer. I'd been a little bit lost in the code, but it hadn't been that long.
"Guess I won't get much sleep tonight then. I need to solve this." I told her, taking a deep sip of the coffee.
Well blast. She'd slipped one of my sedatives into it.
***
I woke up in bed, which was at least better than pulling my face off a keyboard.
I lay there, looking at the ceiling for a long time, my mind chasing loops of thought. Eventually I decided I'd wasted enough time.
"Stacy, you have until I am capable of moving to get me a real cup of coffee, or you do not want to know what I will do your brain."
I rolled out of bed. Fought with myself internally for a few minutes, and then started my exercise routine. Over three weeks of a Tinkertech diet and exercise regime had helped me immensely, even if I wasn't following my powers advice on sleep patterns. I was now at the point where, even without my technology. I was almost a match for one unpowered, unarmed gang member.
Not actually impressive, but not too bad considering where I started.
From there, it was time for more study.
I was in my lab, replaying two files on my mask, trying to make sense of them when Victor came to visit me.
The first was the Mayhem Protocol, trapped in a chair and given ten seconds to fulfill the objective, 'tell me what you are.'
It had responded. 'The Mayhem Protocol.'
The next was the same protocol, still trapped in a chair, and given ten seconds to fulfill two objectives. 'Tell me what you are' and 'survive.'
It had responded. 'I am what will rise from your ashes.'
Apparently my survival depended on melodrama. I made a mental note to come back to the Mayhem issue before I tried to use it again as Victor entered the lab, and another mental note to find Stacy and teach her how to brew a proper cup of coffee. Then rose.
I had a breakout to plan.
Jackercracks
In a British accent
- Location
- England
Shard fuckery at work, people.